Hot Types In The Jazz Age

BOOKS

January 11, 2004|By Reviewed By Roger K. Miller, Special to the Sentinel

The Bandbox of Thomas Mallon's title is a successful men's magazine of 1928 whose unstated motto could be, in the author's words, "a sound mind in a sound body in a good suit." The journalists who produce Bandbox each month are themselves not always of sound mind or body, or even especially well-dressed, but their funny bones are in excellent shape.

Mallon is a remarkable time machine. Possessing an extraordinary ability to create the sense of a historical era, he has written about Lincoln's assassination in Henry and Clara and the 1948 presidential election in Dewey Defeats Truman.

This time it is the Jazz Age, with the added ingredient of humor. Bandbox is so zany, at times so knockdown funny, that the only thing to compare it to is the movies -- screwball comedy, or the multiple slamming doors of a French farce, or the cars-just-missing-locomotives of the Keystone Kops. This puppy moves.

Jehoshaphat (nicknamed Joe or Phat) Harris is the editor in chief of Bandbox. At 60, he is "a throwback to the age of McKinley" and personally out of step with the Jazz Age, but he loves his GQ-like magazine and his profession. By force of will he has turned a moribund magazine into a vibrant one.

Bandbox, however, is in trouble. Some months ago one of Harris' editors, Jimmy Gordon, left to start a rival magazine, which has overtaken Bandbox in popularity. Though Harris does not know it, Gordon has achieved this coup in part through spying, sabotage and other chicanery.

Harris is aided, and sometimes not, in fighting off Gordon's threat by a delightful cast of characters Mallon introduces one by one -- Daisy DiDonna, a lusty researcher who blissfully goes through all the men who cross her path, employing a "sweet suggestive breathiness that could de-ice a windshield"; Max Stanwick, an alliterating crime writer ("Senoritas stabbing their stogie-sucking suitors"); Allen Case, a 20ish copy editor and a shy, neurotic, animal-hugging vegetarian, who is a whiz at rewrite and mimicking other writers' styles; David Fine, the wine and food columnist, whose perpetual feeling of aggrievement leads colleagues to label his column "Fine Whines"; and Aloysius ("Cuddles") Houlihan, 46, an assistant to Harris. Brilliant, but falling apart, he is propped up by Becky Walter, a fellow staffer who loves him.

Outside the staff, the chief characters include sexually predatory Hollywood actress Rosemary La Roche, who makes Stuart Newman, writer of Bandbox's column on the bachelor life, into her sex slave when he is assigned to write about her. Like Daisy, she is, if not strictly a stereotype, then certainly a stretch.

John Shepherd is a collegian from Greencastle, Ind., intoxicated with the sophisticated world represented by Bandbox's editorial and advertising content -- "just one more shiny creature off destiny's assembly line." When he runs off to New York, he is kidnapped by crime boss Arnold Rothstein's thugs and becomes involved in a snowballing plot that takes in everything from animal rights to police corruption to general pandemonium.

Mallon creates his period atmosphere not so much by dropping well-known personal or brand names, but by immersing himself in the research so thoroughly that he comes to a fine understanding of how things and people operate. Take, for example, Henry Roebling, a minor, unseen character. He is a Hemingway-like writer whose prose is so spare "it sometimes seemed he was being paid by the word for what he left out." Harris commissions him to write a freelance piece, but Roebling is too self-important to bother writing anything good, figuring his fame will carry the day. The result is copy so bathetically awful that it is, Harris cries, "like something written by Vachel Lindsay's brother-in-law."

Mallon is a dyed-in-the-wool romantic here, as he was in Dewey Defeats Truman. Several romances and affairs alternately fizzle and pop. Everything is neatly resolved at the end, where everyone gets his or her just deserts, sour or tasty accordingly. Finally, perhaps the best compliment payable to Bandbox is to say it is a magazine you'd like to work at yourself.